The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Globalisation is not as new as we sometimes like to think. Within a mere five years of the publication in 1798 of Jenner’s tract about vaccination, Dr Francisco Xavier de Balmis set sail to the Spanish colony of New Spain (Mexico) with a view to introducing vaccination there. Having done so successfully, he sailed on
The pictures display a man moulded out of pure grade testosterone — a broad-shouldered figure, a face lined and pouched with sensuality, a nose to buttress a cathedral, and ice-grey, challenging eyes. The words reveal something different — a calculating, feline intelligence, self-absorbed, avid for attention, and entirely ruthless in pursuit of its prey. The
In the original Decameron by Boccaccio (mid-14th century) ten characters get together and tell stories within a narrative framework. It is an immensely attractive idea for a writer and has been used periodically ever since, notably by Chaucer. This is the basis for Fay Weldon’s latest novel. However, it has an odd and unattractive contemporary
Was Agatha Christie a good writer? The American critic Edmund Wilson was one of the unhappy few who thought not. In 1944 he wrote a famous essay on Christie whose contentious (and contemptuous) tone can already be inferred from the rhetorical question which its title poses: ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’. That title, in
Ursula’s story begins at dawn on the day her ex-husband is to marry his new love. Ursula lies awake, alone with her bitter thoughts, until a reporter rings seeking her reaction to the wedding. For Bill Osborne is no ordinary ex; he edits a national newspaper and hosts a popular television series, while his new
Lavinia Greenlaw’s clever riposte to the High Fidelity band of writers (a misogynistic group who believe that an obsession with pop and rock is strictly for boys) is a memoir that takes us back through her teenage years in the Seventies to the accompaniment of T. Rex and War’s ‘Me and My Baby Brother’. Music,
The eight short stories which form this collection began life in a multicultural magazine called Metro Eirann, which was set up in 2000 by two Nigerian journalists living in Dublin. Roddy Doyle heard of the magazine, liked the idea, and offered his services. As he says, in his introduction: There’s a love story, a horror
‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor, /Blessed be the vintage!)’ ‘The Craftsman’ is one of my favourite Kipling poems: ‘Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid, /He to the overbearing Boanerges /Jonson,
If you’re planning a visit to the cinema this weekend, I recommend you bypass the cold, albeit visually impressive, ‘Atonement’, in favour of Julie Delpy’s first effort as an actor, writer and director, ‘2 Days in Paris’. The premise is simple: a couple round off a tour Europe by spending two days with the girl’s
No words required, mes amis. Peter Martin’s commentary for Radio Clyde is almost as good as the goal itself.
My 12-year-old sister shouted, ‘Come and watch this TV programme, you’ll love it. It is all about naked men trying to prove how tough they are.’ She was right, I did like it, so much so that at the end, when applicants were invited to apply for the second series, I filled in the online
Henrietta Bredin has put together a series of events to celebrate the Royal Opera House’s Ring cycle It is with considerable trepidation that I venture to write about Richard Wagner in these pages, considering that in doing so I am following a trail well blazed by Bernard Levin — a passionate and lushly articulate devotee
Exhibitions: Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s ‘Adam and Eve’; Work, Rest & Play Amazingly, the Courtauld can claim to have mounted the first exhibition in England devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (c.1472–1553). He’s not an artist we know at all well here, though one or two images will be familiar from reproduction, probably elegant,
Where does Sibelius stand today? Twenty years ago, the answer would have been not very high. Today, 50 years after his death, I think it would be ‘on the up’ again, especially as we now know not just the symphonies and tone-poems but also the wonderful songs in performances by Karita Mattila, Soile Isokoski, Anne
I see Squeeze have reformed and are touring again. In fact, there don’t seem to be many bands who haven’t reformed and aren’t touring again. Out there on the road: that’s where the cash is. There seems to be a particular process here. 1. Band splits up in a spirit of mutual enmity and recrimination.
For its final operatic offering, this year’s Edinburgh Festival presented what it billed as ‘World première of a new production’ of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. I suppose every new production is a ‘world première’ but they don’t need to say so. Anyway, this turned out to be a dismal affair, part infuriating and part
Eternal though they may seem, the Proms and the Edinburgh Festival are susceptible to change. Roger Wright will take over the former next year and Jonathan Mills has just assumed responsibility for the latter. New appointments do not necessarily mean that anything more up-to-date will happen, nor that the change will be for the better
There has been such a lot of fuss and hype around this adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel — as if this is all anybody has ever been waiting for — that I did wonder if I had anything new or useful to say. But then I realised: 1) it’s never stopped me before and
Sorry, I’m in Sardinia at the moment and I couldn’t find any preview tapes that really grabbed me before I went away so if you don’t mind I thought I’d just have a general grumble about the state of TV. First, Weekend Nazis (BBC1, Monday), whose undercover team made the truly cataclysmic discovery that one
Nobody much likes television, especially not the people who work in it. They think it’s a cretinous medium, a sort of institutionalised con-trick, the cultural equivalent of a McDonald’s Happy Meal — processed excrement which everybody, including the consumer, knows to be dumb and bad for you. I suspect that this has always been true.
Alternative reading Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls and Drives by E. Annie Proulx E Annie Proulx is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain: she has also won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the O. Henry Award and the Dos Passos Prize, and is thus one of the most lauded of all American
Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd For some reason, the sight of the sea or a river in any historical film always strikes the viewer with a shock, as though some gross anachronism had been committed. It looks frankly very odd to see people walking along a beach, or even by the side of many
Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee In the last scene of J. M. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Disgrace, the main character, David Lurie, helps to put down homeless dogs. He places their remains in black plastic bags and takes them to the incinerator. Until then, Lurie has not shown himself to be
Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson One day in 1917 the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls told the assembled sixth form, ‘I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry.’ She was right. Nearly three quarters of a million young
Exit Music by Ian Rankin ‘You … are … history.’ Approx- imately halfway through Ian Rankin’s latest and surely most brilliant thriller Exit Music, these appalling words are spoken to D. I. John Rebus by his superior. What is worse, Chief Constable James Corbyn means it. He’s not simply referring to the fact that Rebus
The Golden Age of Censorship by Paul Hoffman T. S. Eliot thought it a curiosity of our culture that we use the word ‘taboo’ purely negatively. The word ‘censor’ is surely similar: the notion that any person or society could survive for long without some forms of censorship is fatuous, and yet it is something
Euan Uglow: The Complete Paintings Catalogue raisonné by Catherine Lampert; Essays by Richard Kendall and Catherine Lampert Whether we know it or not ‘we crave the inexpressive in art’, Bernard Berenson wrote, as an antidote to the sensationalism of ‘the representational arts most alive, the cinema and the illustrated press’. He was writing about Euan
A Pembrokeshire Pioneer by Roscoe Howells In 1903, in one tremulous little 12-second hop, just 10 feet off the ground, Orville Wright made the first powered flight by a man. Or was it? In the village of Saundersfoot on the Pembrokeshire coast there is the belief amongst the old who can still remember what their
Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett Zugzwang, from the German Zug (move) and Zwang (obligation), is a term used in chess when the player whose turn it is to move has no move that does not worsen his position. It is not merely a bad position, but the state of being obliged to move when no move